Grief is love, and love never truly dies

Sometimes life has a funny way of bringing us full circle. Thirty-three years ago, I stood in a church and married one of my college roommates to the love of her life. I asked them to make promises to each other. I heard them say the words couples have spoken for generations: that they would love each other, stand beside one another and remain faithful to one another until death parted them.  On that September day, those words probably sounded like the distant conclusion of a very long story.    

Last week, I found myself standing in front of my friend once again in a church.  Only this time it wasn't for a wedding ceremony but to help her say goodbye to her husband, who died at the age of 64 after battling cancer.

There is something about standing in a sacred space three decades apart that makes one stop and think. At their wedding, one of the Scripture passages I read was 1 Corinthians 13–the familiar passage about love being patient and kind, about love bearing, believing, hoping and enduring. We have probably heard those words at a hundred weddings.  We tend to think of them as wedding words. But officiating at the funeral of my friendís husband brought the words back to me in a new way. Because one of the things grief teaches us is that death changes many things, but love doesn't die.

The laughter is still there in our memories. The stories are still there. The little things that once seemed ordinary suddenly become precious. A favorite saying. A familiar laugh. We carry those things with us. 

And then there is the part we don't know. And that is where faith enters the picture. The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that "We don't see things clearly.  We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist." We are people who spend a lot of time wanting answers. We want to know what is going to happen next. We want to understand why something happened. We want to see around the corner. We want the whole picture. But we can't see it – and there are days it feels like we're living in the fog. We can see enough to take the next step, but not enough to see where the road ultimately leads. Grief can feel that way. So can life.

In those moments there is something holy about trusting God with the parts of life we cannot see or understand. And that is why the words from Corinthians I read at a wedding 33 years ago meant something different at a funeral.

"Love never dies." At a wedding, those words sound like a promise about the future. At a funeral, they sound like a promise about what remains.  Love doesnít suddenly stop at death. It means death changes the way we experience life with someone we love.  We can no longer reach out and hold their hand or hear their voice, but the love that was built over a lifetime doesn't simply vanish.

There is a beautiful image at the end of the book of Revelation, of God making all things new.  No more mourning. No more crying. No more pain. I don't pretend to know exactly what that day will look like. But I trust God who does. I like to picture it as the day the fog finally lifts. The day we no longer have to squint through the mist or try to make sense of a picture we can only partly see. The day we finally see clearly.

Until then, Paul tells us we have three things to do: trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly and love extravagantly. We love the people God has blessed us with. We tell the stories. We laugh when we can. We cry when we need to. We hold tightly to the people who are still sitting beside us. And when the road gets foggy, we trust God who can see the whole way. 

Last week, I stood before my friend and her family in a church. A different life moment with different kinds of tears. But the same truth was in both places:  Love never dies.